Everyone knows about Google. It's the company that rules the internet, dominates the smartphone operating-systems market and has the whole online video thing sewn up. As if that weren't enough, there's a fair chance we'll all be driving (or rather driven by) Google cars in the not-too-distant future.

One of the perpetually amazing things about Google's core search service is that you can scour the web's images, not just its words. What's even more amazing is how the feature came about.

As explained by Google chairman Eric Schmidt, Google Images was conceived after actress Jennifer Lopez wore a famously revealing green dress to the 2000 Grammys. It was the most popular search topic of the time (how little has changed), but of course people weren't really looking for a written description. Google took note. From such celebrity ogling, Google Image Search was born.

2. GOOGLE ALMOST HAD A MUCH SEEDIER NAME

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When Larry Page and Sergey Brin started working on their first search engine at Stanford University in the mid-'90s, it was known by its working title of BackRub. This slightly seedy name was a reference to the way the engine worked through backlinks in order to provide its results.

Fortunately, the duo realised that this wasn't a particularly good moniker with which to conquer the (then fledgling) internet, and they settled upon Google. Which, of course, is a misspelling of Googol - a mathematical term for 10 to the power of 100.

It's a tough job being the biggest company on the internet. Along with the acclaim and the billions of dollars comes the inevitable trolling.

Seeking to preempt such abuse, Google has bought up a number of rude, suggestive, misleading, and just plain bizarre Google-related web addresses. For example, it owns the following domain names: Googlesex.com, Googlepoo.com, Googleporn.com, Googlereligion.com and, yes, Googlesucks.com.

You might have noticed Google's penchant for building sweet-themed Android statues to sit on its front lawn, but they're not the coolest ornaments at Mountain View. Not by a long shot. That honour would probably go to the company's life-sized T-Rex model, Stan.

The dinosaur was actually moulded from the fossils of a real Tyrannosaurus Rex that was dug up near Google's HQ. Stan has been standing guard on campus for a number of years now. Who needs Jurassic Park when you can visit Google instead?

It's one of those perpetual daydreams for anyone with a passing interest in tech. Imagine if you'd had the opportunity to invest in Google way back in the '90s.

We suspect that for Yahoo and Excite (one of the first internet portals), such musings are more like nightmares. Both companies had the chance to purchase Google outright in the late '90s, and both turned the opportunity down. The asking price: a paltry $1 million. Google is now worth more than $500 billion. So yeah, that's got to hurt.

You've no doubt heard of Google's "don't be evil" mantra, which is taken from its code of conduct (since subsumed by their self-built parent company Alphabet's more corporate version). What you might not realise is that this same code of conduct states Google's position on the constantly raging war between cats and dogs.

"Google's affection for our canine friends is an integral facet of our corporate culture," reads point five of the policy. "We like cats, but we're a dog company, so as a general rule we feel cats visiting our offices would be fairly stressed out."

7. GOOGLE DOODLES STARTED AS OUT-OF-OFFICE NOTIFICATIONS

We all love the Google Doodle, which sees the internet search giant frequently re-skinning its famous logo for special days or events. But did you know that the Google Doodle came about as a creative out-of-office notification for founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin?

At the end of August, 1998, the then-fresh-faced engineers took the week off ahead of Google's official incorporation as a company (wonder how that went) to attend the Burning Man festival. To let people know that they were away partying, they modified the Google search page logo with the Burning Man icon.

When you're a young, creative company with money to burn, you don't always do normal things by the book. For example, why buy a Flymo to maintain your company's lawn when you can hire a bunch of goats to do the job instead?

Back in 2009, that's precisely what Google decided to do. Now, whenever the grass needs cutting, a herder will turn up with around 200 goats to spend a week grazing on Google's lawns. We kid you not (sorry).

We all know the drill. After getting on famously in the early days Apple now openly hates Google, and Google pretends to like Apple in public while continually undermining it in private. It's the 'will they/won't they/no they most certainly will not' of our times.

But Steve Jobs was never one to stick to the script. Google's Vic Gundotra recalls a time when he received a call from the great man himself on a Sunday morning. Jobs was unhappy about the yellow colour gradient on the second 'O' of the Google logo, as displayed on the iPhone screen. Apple's legendary co-founder had already assigned an engineer to help fix this "urgent issue" on Google's behalf.